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Measuring affective outcomes from a visit to a Science Education Centre

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Abstract

One of the problems in measuring affective outcomes from visits to science education centres like the CSIROSEC laboratories, is that different students have quite different experiences. They attend to different sets of activities or exhibits for different lengths of time, they have different amounts of previous knowledge and they may interact in different ways. Measurement of affective outcomes must take account of this diversity and, if it is to be useful for teachers, a measuring instrument must be brief, easy to understand and to score. This paper reports the results of a pilot study which devised a way of measuring affective outcomes from visits to a CSIROSEC. Specifically, students responded in terms of how easy they found various aspects of the activities, their enjoyment of what they did, and how helpful they found the visit in terms of their wider views and understanding about science and scientists.

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Specializations: gender issues and assessment in science and technology education.

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Rennie, L.J. Measuring affective outcomes from a visit to a Science Education Centre. Research in Science Education 24, 261–269 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02356352

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